


Two Dearer

by nnozomi



Category: Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
Genre: Futurefic, Gen, Slightly Kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 16:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17103815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: When their second child is born, Janet and Thomas have a request to make of Janet's old roommates.





	Two Dearer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greenlily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/gifts).



Tina was sewing when the phone on the table rang. Before college she wouldn't have thought twice about pricking herself with a needle; the pain was negligible and her needles were sterile, fresh out of a 20-pack. Now, touched by a momentary superstition, she was careful to slip the needle into the pincushion (a plump felt apple) before she picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"May I speak to Christina Lindstrom?"

"Speaking. Molly?" Four years of college in the darkest Midwest, and yet Molly's Northeastern accent had returned with full force since the moment she was back on the East Coast.

"Yes, me. Good, I caught you at home. Thomas just called Robin―Janet's had the baby."

"But she wasn't due till the end of the month!"

"You're the resident, not me, you should know babies come when they please," Molly said primly.

"I'm not an obstetrician," Tina pointed out. In actual fact she was wavering between ENT with a specialization in vocal health, the practical choice, and psychiatry, which would be frustrating and unrewarding in comparison but persisted in fascinating her. "Is she all right? Are they both all right?"

"Thriving, as far as Robin could make out. You know how Thomas gets when he's excited."

"I do, yes." Tina returned primness for primness, before returning firmly to the matter at hand. "That's wonderful. I'll send something. I can't wait to see it―her? It's a little girl this time, right?"

"Yes." Molly hesitated at the other end of the line. Tina thought she could hear her sipping tea, and almost expected the fragrance to waft her way the way it had in college. "Listen. They want to have…I don't know what Thomas actually said and what got translated into Robinese…something like a christening ceremony? Next Friday, when they’ll both have settled in at home again. Do you think there's any way you could make it up to Ithaca by then?"

Tina looked at her pincushion. "Are we the fairy godmothers, then?"

"Better us than some others, I think is what Jan and Thomas have in mind," Molly said, a touch grimly. "Remember I told you―two…?"

"What does Robin say?" Tina asked reluctantly. She found Robin an unapproachable anomaly as anything but Molly's long-time off-again on-again boyfriend, an unreliable but delightful actor; the other facets of his existence made her thoughts stutter like a worn-out cassette tape. It was undeniable, though, that this was his field of expertise far more than either of theirs.

"Oh, the usual…" Molly sighed, half-exasperated. "All kinds of quotations―most of them in English, at least―and mystifications. I can't tell if he doesn't know himself or just can't say it straight out. The best translation I can come up with is 'better safe than sorry,' though."

Tina thought about next week's rotations, and calculated whether the shift debts she had owing to her would cover it and if the bus schedules from Baltimore to Ithaca might cooperate. If Edward _and_ Hsi-Lin were free, and Dave's girlfriend didn't have a concert on Friday―

"I think so. I could get there. Is Robin coming with you?" she asked.

"He can’t make it. One of his school groups is performing on the Friday and Saturday, and he has to be there for rehearsals. He gets conscientious at the _oddest_ times.” Robin supplemented his erratic income as a professional actor with an only slightly less erratic avocation as a theater coach in various New York City schools; improbably, he was apparently extremely good at it and adored by his students.

“He’s always been that way about theater,” Tina pointed out. “Can you make it from Massachusetts?”

"I suppose,” Molly sighed. “I'll be flat-out amazed if my poor old Buick makes it that far, I can tell you."

"We'll have to be grateful to Jan for scheduling the baby for spring, not the dead of winter. I really would think twice about heading up there in the snow."

They made some final arrangements, wished each other luck, and hung up. Tina contemplated the lace half-attached to the blouse she was sewing and sighed. Then she touched the pincushion with two fingers and picked up the receiver again.

 

Susan was still awake, or so she said. Tina told her where she was going and why she might not be in time for folkdancing on that Friday. "Be safe on the bus," Susan said cheerfully; Tina could picture her pushing her glasses up her nose with one finger and using the back of her wrist to work a sweep of hair out of her eyes. "Tell them all I said hello."

"I will," Tina promised. "Don't let anyone else partner you in the Levi Jackson when I'm not there."

Susan worked at a non-profit in Washington, something to do with restoring historical buildings. She had begun as a meek and hapless dogsbody and was now being threatened with promotion to assistant director, which was typical of Susan. She still folk-danced, and had less trouble making time for it than a harried medical resident did, but refused to take any of the group's administrative positions, although she did help sew costumes for those not handy with a needle.

Susan spent most of her weekends in Baltimore, except when Tina was on shift; they went home together from the Friday night dances and woke up together the next morning, lazy and comfortable. She wasn't as given to early rising as Tina was―most people weren't, even other Midwestern Swedes―but it was nice to leave her lying in bed, soft brown hair spread over the pillow and comforter tugged up to her chin, while Tina made coffee and heated up croissants and forgot not to whistle.

Tina had thought briefly of asking her to come up to Ithaca too; it would have been nice to have the extra few days together. She didn't think either of them was quite ready to appear on the same terms as Janet and Thomas or even Molly and Robin, though. Molly's letters suggested that she had a good idea what was going on, but then Molly was never fazed by the usual things. Janet for all her deliberate rejections of normality could be oddly conservative from time to time, not in the sense of Tina's Lutheran grandparents but with a certain resistance to movements in the universe that took her by surprise. As for Thomas, Tina wasn't sure of the etiquette of introducing a present lover to a former one, even if they had met in the past (they wouldn't sit down and compare notes, would they?). She decided Janet and Thomas would have enough on their plates for now.

 

Janet, Thomas, and four-year-old Alexander―and now his sister―inhabited the second floor of a rickety wood-frame house on a hill so steep that Chicago-bred Tina found it a mystery why all the houses didn't simply slide down it and accumulate in a pile at the bottom. "Grad students are on the bottom rung in this town," Thomas shrugged. "Undergrads live in delightful brick piles, very reminiscent of good old Ericson and company but with even more turrets, and professors have a leafy enclave all their own. The rest of the world lives in the valley or on the tops of the other hills and thinks we’re all mad.”

“Which you are,” Molly remarked automatically. She had brought Alex a Slinky, and was watching him decide what to do with it. “They let you take the spring term off, Jan?”

Janet made a face. “In return for teaching a whole string of summer intensives, yes. Thomas will be on baby-minding duty, and maybe he’ll even get some writing done in the interstices, but I honestly don’t know what’s to become of my dissertation. Seven years at Blackstock will look like nothing.”

“Keats and Hunt have waited, what, a hundred and fifty years so far, they can wait a bit longer,” Molly said firmly. “Let us see the cause of all this fuss.”

“If it doesn’t mean waking her,” Tina added practically.

With the same look of almost fey shyness that Tina remembered from Alex’s birth, Janet unveiled the bundle she wore slung at her chest, to reveal a very baby-like baby, feathery eyelashes just visible against round cheeks, with a soft fuzz of pale hair.

“We think she’s going to be blond like Thomas, but then we thought Alex was too, and look at him now. I should have known better, I suppose; Andrew started out just as light-haired.”

“How are Andrew and Lily doing?”

“Thriving. They’ll be pleased to hear you asked after them. Lily seems to have her pick of most of the boys and about half the girls at Oberlin, but she’s busy deciding whether to stick to the School of Music or add a math major as well. Which would make her the first person in our family in recorded history to go onto the science side. Andrew’s running cross-country and track and reading everything about Roman history he can get his hands on; even with Thomas supplementing his reading list he’s going great guns. Not the literature,” Janet added crossly, “not even Catullus, which you’d think would be it for any sixteen-year-old boy. Just the history.”

“All Gaul is divided into three parts,” Molly chanted.

“Except for a small village in upstate New York. Anyway, they’re well. Lily sent a whole stack of tapes that she guarantees will send the baby sweetly off to sleep at any time of night or day, although I don’t know how she knows that, since if I remember correctly _she_ didn’t sleep through the night until she was in nursery school.”

The apartment not being amply supplied with extra bedrooms, the baby’s crib was in a corner of the living room (an awkward parallelogram in shape, but currently lit with weak early-spring sunlight and brightened by one of Janet’s mother’s rag rugs all in reds and golds). Janet settled her carefully into it and made herself comfortable on the sofa with a sigh. “Sit down, everyone, make yourself at home.”

Everyone sat down here and there, except for Alex, who produced a battered wooden train from his room and sprawled on the carpet with it, apparently considering how it and Molly’s Slinky might play nicely together.

“You look good, Janet,” Tina remarked, gazing with a professional eye. “I expect you’re tired already of being asked how the birth went.”

“Well, it went. Other than showing up early, she was very cooperative. My mother’s very disconcerted that her plane tickets have suddenly become irrelevant, but it’s not as if the baby will have disappeared three weeks from now.” Janet blinked, and reached down to tap her knuckles ritually on the wood floor.

“Speaking of which,” said Thomas.

“First,” said Molly, “tell us what you named her.”

"Beatrice Margaret Carter-Lane," Janet said precisely.

Molly screwed up her eyes in concentration for a moment. "'Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably'?"

Thomas grinned. "Yes, among other things. ‘It were possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you…’ “

“’Oh that [you] had been written down an ass,’” Janet shot back.

Tina was conscious of an interior shrug― _they're at it again, talking their nonsense_ ―which suddenly filled her with nostalgia for college. She had actually missed this feeling of uncomprehending impatience tinted, eventually, with fondness.

"I have to say," Janet went on, "we were both a bit too busy to notice whether there were any stars dancing when she was born. In any case her birth certificate says eleven-something AM, so frankly I doubt it."

"Bee for everyday use," Thomas added, "and before anyone asks, no, we are not planning to go on having any more children in alphabetical order."

"Zephaniah," Molly suggested. "Zenobia. Xerxes."

"No."

"Beatrice is lovely," Tina said firmly. "And her middle name―" A sudden memory flicked her, overlaid with soapsuds and Bach fugues. "Not for…?"

Thomas and Molly both looked puzzled, but Janet caught Tina's eye and nodded. "It's a family name―my middle name is Margaret, after my grandmother―but a bit of a double meaning…a reminder…will do no harm and might do much good.”

Tina nodded, taking it on faith, and Thomas cleared his throat. “Molly, I know Robin told you what we thought of…”  
“We’re ready,” Molly said, reaching down to fumble in her disgraceful old duffle bag. “Here and now?”

“Yes. Please.”

Molly had brought a starfish, a real one, small and elegant enough to fit on the palm of her hand, and almost light enough to blow away if you breathed on it. She had threaded a fine chain through the hole at its center. "They're pretty," she said, "and resilient, and they can live in an incredible variety of environments. And they're hundreds of million years old."

" _This_ one is?" said Alex hopefully, examining it from close up with hands carefully behind his back. "Doesn't _look_ that old."

Tina giggled; Molly was explaining that the starfish in question had relatives going that far back. Alex looked slightly disappointed, but amenable.

Janet took the starfish with great care and hung it from one of the hooks over the baby's crib, where it would move a little in the drafts of warm air from the heater, and she would be able to see it but not grab it (or eat it). "Thank you, Molly," she said formally, and hugged her without any formality at all; her red hair, trailing down from its haphazard bun, quarreled violently with Molly's scarlet sweatshirt, but the hug fit like a glove. Tina's eyes met Thomas' over the shorter women's shoulders, and he smiled and shrugged at her, apparently familiar with this new propensity of Janet's to hug people of her own volition. Or at least Molly.

"And you, Tina?" he said lightly, when Janet and Molly had moved apart and Alex, not wanting to be left out of any hug action going, was tugging at Molly's hem.

Objects close at hand that would make handy baby souvenirs, let alone talismans, were not exactly common in Tina's field. She had thought about it, and dug out her Jung―the battered old edition she'd had since high school―and put the _Musical Offering_ on the record player. Finally, she went downtown and perused the department stores, with some success.

The little stuffed cat was not exactly an original gift, maybe, but its (his?) gray-and-white coloring was pleasingly reminiscent of their old Amoeba (now growing plump and elderly with Tina’s family in Chicago). Tina had made a collar out of a hair ribbon she wore sometimes for dancing, deep forest green embroidered all through with daisies in gold thread, tied in a bow and prudently sealed with a dab of surgical glue.

"I'll get her a real one when she's old enough to take care of it, but I didn't think you'd welcome a kitten along with a brand new baby."

"Just right. Jan, you know what the _bio_ in biologist stands for, with all that Greek of yours.” Molly reached over to scratch the kitten between its gray ears, her pinky making it twitch a paw in response; she stroked a thumb along the embroidery of daisies. “Life in its various versions close at hand. Amoeba the Second, clearly," she added.

"Jeoffry!" Thomas pronounced. "For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life…”

"Don't mind him," Janet said, and hugged Tina, who found herself as pleased as she'd been at the end of freshman year in a similar context. Janet smelled of milk and mint tea, and she clung to Tina, who was eight inches taller, with surprising tenaciousness. "Thank you, Tina," she said, again with that hint of ritual, and tucked the cat carefully in along the baby's side.

Alex was looking wistful. Tina grinned down at him and offered her other purchase, a small gray stegosaurus with soulful black eyes. Pleased, he began to introduce it formally to the train set.

Thomas put a record on; the Liebeslieder Walzer, Tina recognized, warm and plangent and expansive. "No Grateful Dead for a while," he said to Molly, grinning. "Not now that Alex is old enough to ask about the lyrics…"

"If they're old enough to ask, they're old enough to be told," Molly chanted. "I'll send him a Dead record on his next birthday."

"I want a record that's _alive_ ," Alex contradicted, and was puzzled by the adult laughter.

The baby―Bee―woke and wailed; Janet scooped her up and opened her blouse to nurse ("Alex isn't old enough to care, Thomas has seen it before, and both of you lived with me for four years on end"). Molly started a giggling waltz with Alex. Thomas went into the kitchen to make a round of tea, and Tina went with him to help carry the mugs.

"You're looking well," he said to her, with the precise-edged, slightly confused courtesy he had kept up since they had made their peace in senior year. "Not working too hard?"

"Of course I'm working too hard. Nobody could possibly get through interning without working too hard, but I like it." Tina considered him: bleary-faced with lack of sleep, his fair hair clean but badly in need of a cut, wearing ragged jeans and a Blackstock sweatshirt which had started out black and faded to an indeterminate grey, the seal almost entirely worn away. "You're looking well too. How's the next book going?"

Thomas groaned. "I've been too busy worrying about the sequel to my first child to spare time for the sequel to my first book, thank you very much. Maybe I'll get back to it around the time Bee starts sleeping through the night. Or maybe when she and Alex have both gone off to college."

"Your publisher might get a little impatient," Tina said, and remembered, thanks to his phrasing, something Molly had almost said on the phone. "Two dearer," she said aloud.

Thomas froze.

"That's what she said, isn't it? Professor Medeous. Molly told me about it."

"Not Janet?" Thomas said rather automatically, his face still set.

Tina grinned. "Janet didn't think I'd believe her. Molly's a scientist." The tea-kettle sang. "Mugs," she said to Thomas.

"Mugs. Right." Still moving as if his mind were worlds away, Thomas reached up to grab several mugs out of a cabinet, wearing them on his fingers like rings. He clattered them down on the counter, managing not to break anything, and began handing her teabags.

"Mint for Janet." Tina selected a large white mug that said "oh for a muse of fire" in red letters. "Chamomile for Molly." This was a thick, puddly pottery thing in shades of deep blue and green. "Cocoa for Alex"―a sturdy yellow plastic beaker with Luke Skywalker on it―"and instant coffee for me." She chose a William Morris patterned mug. "And what for you?"

"I'd like an explanation with my caffeinated substance," Thomas said drily. "I didn't think you believed in…any of that."

"I'm a medical resident and a rationalist," Tina said briskly. "I'm not an idiot. Thomas, do you really think that a starfish and a stuffed kitten are going to protect Bee from…" for all that, she couldn't quite bring herself to say "the Faerie Queen" out loud―"from…"

"The rulers of the darkness of this world?" Thomas suggested quietly. "I don't know, Tina. I spent seven years with those people and I still don't understand how they work. Molly has been sleeping with Robin for the better part of a decade and she doesn't know either. But ritual and symbols are important for them. Not necessarily binding in the sense that they are literally incapable of transgressing them, but powerful, oh, societal restrictions, like…well…"

"Like health care regulations," Tina filled in, inspired. "Fair enough. What tea do you want?"

Thomas groaned. "Just give me the damn instant coffee already, I give in."

He fell asleep on the sofa anyway. Janet put the baby carefully on his chest, and Tina remembered that she’d packed an old Brownie and took a photograph. Alex investigated new possibilities at knee-level. Tina and Molly and Janet sat and drank tea and ate some slightly elderly Girl Scout cookies Janet had remembered living in the back of a cupboard (“my advisor has daughters…”) and talked like any old roommates catching up on their lives.

 Tina listened to Molly’s quick wry laugh and Janet’s dry deliberations and her own placid contributions, and thought that while in the world they were warding off, “two dearer” might have only an arithmetical meaning (what was that joke Robin brought up sometimes—allusion, contractions, mystification, and decision?), here they might dare to interpret it exponentially.

 

**Author's Note:**

> A quick treat because I liked your prompt. It turned out more of an ensemble piece than a focus on Tina and Molly, but I hope you enjoy it.


End file.
